


House Rules

by FabulaRasa



Category: DCU
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-27
Updated: 2013-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-21 11:34:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/899821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabulaRasa/pseuds/FabulaRasa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce would like people to stop having sex in his house. Difficult conversations ensue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	House Rules

"Tim."

He stopped on the first level of stairs, and that particular timbre of voice set off every alarm bell in him.

"We need to talk."

He glanced at Dick, his back to them, running spectro-analysis on the computer. He hated when Bruce did that; pretended Dick's presence was somehow like the walls or the T-Rex, just as expected, just as indispensable. Tim thought of it as the "Dad and Mom" act, and he hated it. Bruce had spun in his chair to face him, and in some ways Tim wished he hadn't pulled his cowl off. Sometimes those eyes were a little too penetrating. 

"What happened last night," and he heard Bruce's hesitation, as well as the slight emphasis on _night_ , "will not happen again. Is that understood?"

Tim kept careful control of his breathing, making sure it was as steady and even as Bruce's. Useless to pretend he didn't know what Bruce was talking about; even more useless, probably, to pretend it didn't anger him. Goddamn him for doing this in front of Dick, who was typing a bit faster and louder than before. 

"Actually," Tim said. "It's going to be happening a lot." He hadn't known that until he said it. He hadn't even had this conversation with Cass. For all he knew, she never wanted to talk to him again.

_Stop we have to stop. Cass. God. Oh fuck._

_I know. I know oh God don't stop_. The salty taste of her lips, the hard crush of her pelvic bone beneath him.

They had been lying on her bed. It had been friendly, just two friends lying there talking. There had been a lot to talk about; a lot in this shitty year that he needed to talk about, and who the hell else was there? He had lost his father, he had lost Stephanie, and he felt like a boat cut loose and bumping into things—just that out of control, just that aimless and rudderless. It had been easy to say those things to Cass, in the dark. Easier to release the hard ache in his chest, and let the tears come. He hadn't meant to kiss her. _I didn't mean to_ , he kept whispering to her, but she seized his face in her hands. _I did._

"Tim." Bruce's voice was as level as before. "You are seventeen years old. Cassandra is sixteen. You are both my responsibility. If you wish to embark on a romantic entanglement with each other, I can't stop you. I can counsel you against it, if you would listen to me, which I expect you will not."

"That isn't—"

"I wasn't finished," Bruce said. He had never seen anyone stare at a computer screen as hard as Dick was right now. It made him want to punch Dick in the face. "There are rules in this house, and you will observe them. You will not have sex in this house. You will not be in Cassandra's bedroom after midnight. Whatever romantic activities the two of you wish to get up to, they will not happen under my roof. I ask you again, is that understood?"

The goddamn cameras in this house. It had only been a wishful surmise, that they weren't in the bedrooms too. "You were coming out of her room at four this morning," Bruce said, with an arch of his brow, as though he read Tim's thoughts. "Right about the time I was getting up. You didn't bother to check your sightlines."

"Not in my own _house_ ," he muttered, and there was possibly the smallest quirk of Bruce's lip. 

"It won't happen again," Bruce said, and spun back to his monitor. Case closed, conversation over. Tim's chest felt too tight to breathe.

"My eighteenth birthday is in six weeks," he said quietly. 

"And when is Cass's?" Bruce's voice had a touch of sharpness to it, for the first time. Bruce didn't care for conversations that continued after he had declared them over. 

"Right," Tim said. "I get it. No underage sex in Wayne Manor." He wasn't imagining that Dick's fingers faltered on the keyboard, before he began typing even faster. "I guess that's a pretty unbreakable rule, right there," he continued, and now he was looking right at Dick, who couldn't pretend not to know it. He had to feel Tim's gaze on his back. 

"It is, in fact."

"Right," Tim said again. "Well, I'd hate to violate one of those. Wouldn't you, Dick?" Dick stopped typing now, and turned to look at him. He wouldn't have said it if his own rage hadn't driven him. It was just the way Dick kept standing there, saying nothing. Nothing. 

"Cass is too young," Bruce persisted. "Even when you're eighteen, she will just be seventeen. That's too young to make that kind of judgment call. That's too young to know what you want."

"I see," Tim said. "Too young. Is that right, Dick? I mean, I'm just curious what your thoughts are here. Do you think seventeen is too young for that?"

"Something you want to say, Tim?" Dick's voice was soft, and absent all reproach, and Tim felt his own smallness. He wouldn't kick at Dick like a petulant child, just because his own knuckles had been rapped. 

"No," he said. "I'm sorry." He turned and headed up the stairs then, letting the weight of his boots hit every stair. At the top, he heard Bruce's voice call up to him.

"Tim." And he knew what Bruce was waiting for. He shut his eyes.

"It won't happen again," he said through his tense jaw, and was out the sliding door.

* * *

They continued working in silence, but it was a silence that had movement and breath. His concentration on the spectro-analysis was shot to hell now, and Bruce would bitch at him about having to start that over, but he could suck it. It was hard to get Tim's face out of his head. He had never heard Tim offer defiance to Bruce that way; he would imagine the experience was new for Bruce, too. He knew Bruce didn't fool himself that Tim's acquiescence was anywhere close to submission. Easy to overlook the thin steel blade of Tim's spine. 

In the end it wasn't Bruce who broke the silence. He started the spectro-analysis over again (at which Bruce scowled) and when he had entered the last keystroke on the re-administered test, he sat in the chair beside Bruce and waited for him to turn.

"I should have told you a long time ago."

Bruce only grimaced. "Dick. I don't need you to confess your teenage sexual misadventures. Spare us both."

Dick's fingers beat a quick staccato on the console beside him. It would be so easy to leave it there, so goddamn easy. "That's not what Tim was talking about," he said. "I didn't actually have sex in this house when I was a teenager. For what it's worth. Which is not, as it turns out, very goddamn much. Bruce. Tim meant—what he was talking about was—"

He could get up right now, and walk away. A barbed spike of pain and shame lanced his throat. He swallowed past it. "He. . . he kept at me," he whispered. He heard every cringe-inducing, self-justifying, pathetic syllable of it. "Believe me—believe me, I know what that sounds like. I know what I sound like. But I don't want you to think that I—that I didn't fight it. It was years. It was easy to laugh it off, when he was younger. He—" He shut his eyes against the pain of it.

"Jason," said Bruce, in a voice that tore off his skin. 

"When he got older," Dick said, and now it was spilling out of him. "He became—harder to resist. In every way. What had seemed like a joke wasn't any more. It was—all the time. And I couldn't—when he was seventeen, I just. . ." He put his head in his hands. "God help me."

If Bruce would only say something. "I told him no, after a while," he continued, desperate now. "I tried to stop it. Before the two of you left for Sarajevo, I had told him it was over, that we weren't going to—anymore. Or at least, not until he was older, not for another year at least. He was so angry. He was so goddamned angry. You know how he—" And he turned his head against the sound of his own voice.

"When I heard what had happened," he went on after a few minutes. "For months, years, I felt like it had been my fault. That I had killed him. That maybe—maybe he had been just that fraction less careful than he should have been, because of me. That his anger at me, or his frustration, that maybe he thought I didn't—didn't feel what he—" his voice broke then, and he wiped at his mouth. Bruce was still looking at him, but he couldn't meet his gaze, and probably never would again.

"And then he was back," he said, in another tone. "And I tried. I went to him. But he. . ." This part of the story was not for Bruce. The pain of what he had tried to do was still too raw, and it was more than that—it would have sounded like he was trying to portray himself as the victim here, when the point wasn't what Jason had done to him later, but what he had done to Jason. But the memories pushed back against the iron wall in his mind.

Bruce's eyes were on him, reading him like they always did. "He was seventeen," Dick said hoarsely. "He was seventeen, and I was twenty-two. I was the adult. I was the one who knew better. I'm the criminal."

He heard the creak of Bruce's chair as he shifted, leaning back. He was resting his head on a gauntleted hand and just studying Dick. 

"Did you know any of this," Dick managed. 

"No," said Bruce. And here he was, for the first time in his life, unable to meet Bruce's eyes. "Tell me. How does Tim know any of this?"

Dick shook his head. "I don't know. Jason might have told him, though that's a little hard to believe. I don't know. Bruce. I can go to the police. I can turn myself in. Tell me what to do here."

The gauntlets were being removed, thoughtfully. "You could," he said. "There wouldn't be a case, though, even with your confession, without some corroborating evidence, which Jason is not going to provide, even could they locate him. And then of course if you were to confess, Jason would have to confess to raping you, wouldn't he? Because I'm assuming that's the meaning of your unwillingness to talk about what happened when you went to him."

Dick tightened his jaw, but the memories battered at him. He had gone to Jason, found him. As soon as they had known it was him. The things he had said then, oh the things he had said. He had laid himself bare. Begged forgiveness, for all of it, and the truth of it was, he hadn't known if he was begging forgiveness for what he had done to him when he was still a boy, or for having ended it. Or maybe for some combination of the two. 

_It was rape, Jason_ , he had said. _We may be men now, but you weren't then. Call it what it was_. 

And Jason's hand, sliding along his throat. _Have it your way, Dickie Bird. A rape for a rape, then_. The knifepoint at his gut had held him still, but Jason hadn't needed the knife. He had known he deserved it. His own shame had immobilized him, and he had swallowed his groans of pain. He had not dared a _Jason please_ because he had known there were no more pleas that could reach Jason, not from him. 

"That's not the part of the story that matters," he insisted, and "Isn't it," Bruce said mildly. 

They sat in silence for a while. He had never been to confession. He had thought about it, once or twice. Once, when he was a kid, he had been downtown with Bruce, walking along the sidewalk, and there had been people pouring out of St. Anthony's on 17th Street: a loud, colorful riot of people, yelling and calling to each other, and his feet had stopped walking because he had known what they were saying, and he hadn't heard anyone speaking Romany in years. His feet just wouldn't move. 

_Gypsy wedding_ , Bruce's business associate had said, with distaste. _Those people. Live like animals. They drift into town and get all their baptisms and weddings done for the year, and then drift out again. Not safe to be a Catholic priest, when the Gypsies are in town._

 _The word is Roma_ , Bruce had said. _And you're a bigot, whose business with me is done._

But honestly, Dick hadn't heard any of that. He had just been watching the crowd. That was the first he had known that most Roma were Catholic. His own parents hadn't cared much about religion, but he remembered rosaries and little plastic statues strewn about, like careless artifacts of a long-vanished civilization. So it had been curious to realize that this was his, by birthright; that if he wanted, he could walk into a confessional and talk to somebody, just say everything that burdened him and have them make it go away. He had thought about in recent years, more than once. 

It probably felt something like this. 

"Can you forgive me," he said through numb lips. What the hell did he expect Bruce to say? Sure kid, you raped my son, but hey, shit happens?

The hand that rested on his hair was heavy, and he bowed his head. "I'm not the one whose forgiveness you need," was all Bruce said. 

"I've asked," Dick husked. "So many times, but he—there isn't any way to—"

"That wasn't who I meant," Bruce said. The hand that had been on his head fell away, and fingers scraped lightly against his jaw. "You were always harder on yourself than I could ever be. However," he continued. "What did that mean, you didn't _actually_ have sex in the house, when you were seventeen?"

Dick winced. "Oh. Well. There's a lot of acreage, at the manor. And a very comfortable roof. And I figured, 'not under my roof' meant, you know, not _under_ your roof."

Bruce barked a laugh, and headed up the stairs. He tossed his gauntlets aside as he went. "A literalist, even then, I see. Finish that analysis, and bring me the results upstairs, if you don't mind. Something tells me I've got some time to spend with a very angry young man right now."

"Need back-up?"

"I'll call it in," he said.

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of my headcanon that I wanted to get written down, but I think it makes a difficult story. The summary makes it sound lighthearted, but it is very much not a lighthearted story, at least in its essentials. And I hesitate to put the Jason/Dick label on this one, because I'm not going to pretend that statutory rape is somehow a sweet romantic thing, or an understandable foible, or a way of saying "oh their love is just so irresistible." So I don't intend to make light of what Dick did wrong, or romanticize it in any way. Sometimes good people make terrible decisions. Sometimes terrible people make good decisions. But I think Jason and Dick have a painful, complicated backstory, and this is one way of seeing that story. 
> 
> Also, I am just a big softie for Tim. If he can survive Batman catching him doing the walk of shame, he can survive anything.


End file.
